Revenge Porn Kingpin Hunter Moore Is Under Investigation By the FBI
We've been waiting for the other shoe to drop in the bizarre shuttering of revenge porn site Is Anyone Up last month, and here it is: Hunter Moore, the site's shithead owner, is being investigated by the FBI. Cool.
During its year-long reign of terror, Is Anyone Up posted nude pictures of normal people, often submitted by vengeful ex-lovers. But the Village Voice's Camille Dodero reports that the investigation was sparked by the fact that a slew of pictures posted to IAU had been stolen from their subjects' inboxes by a hacker who goes by the handle "Gary Jones".
the FBI's Los Angeles Internet Crime division has been actively investigating Hunter Moore and Is Anyone Up for months, according to four people who say they've been interviewed by the FBI about his now-shuttered site. The case's focus, according to those familiar with the investigation, was Moore's possible connection to a hacker who has repeatedly broken into the inboxes of countless victims, rifled through their attachments, and submitted the accompanying nudes to Is Anyone Up. (A Los Angeles FBI spokesperson would not confirm or deny such an investigation.)
"The FBI has been in contact with me," Moore admitted during the same conversation in which he threatened to burn down the Voice. "I have nothing to hide."
Oh, yeah, Moore told Dodero that "I will burn down fucking The Village Voice headquarters if you fucking write anything saying I have an FBI investigation."
That Moore hasn't obnoxiously tweeted even once about Dodero's article since it was published last night shows just how nervous he is about the pending investigation. Usually, he gloats over every new item of bad press with a reliability that could only be the result of a Google news alert for his own name. But now he's just blandly tweeting about some TV show he's filming. It's safe to say this investigation was a key factor behind Moore's otherwise inexplicable decision to sell his site to an anti-bullying website last month.
And Moore should be nervous. He was able to creep his way to internet fame because his site relied on user submissions and was thus protected by the Communications Decency Act. This of course goes out the window if he's proved to have been actively in cahoots with a hacker. He should be OK if he'd just posted content given to him by a hacker; after all, everyone posted those hacked Scarlett Johansson nudes and only the hacker, Christopher Chaney, is going to prison.
Wait for it. Do you feel that? The sweet nectar of schadenfreude washing over the internet like a warm tide coming in.
"Hunter Moore is under FBI investigation," tweets Alex Gaspar. "Is Anyone Upset? Nope, pretty pumped."
Beautiful.
